First, I'm aware that IE does have some type of issue displaying transparent PNG's (though from what I've read, it just confuses me more than helps me understand).

My site (a hurricane tracking site) has (or will soon) several hundred images. What I'm trying to do is have two base images, black and white, and color. Then I have storm tracks drawn on the transparent PNG. Now, both of these images (either the bw or color) and the PNG are displayed with the PNG being offset the height of the base image. The reason I'm doing this is because the user has the ability to switch between color and b/w views. By doing it this way, I can have ~500 images of the tracks or ~1000 images (if I were to draw them on both the b/w and color maps). Plus, if I choose to change the base images, I only have two images to update as opposed to 500-1000 (if not more).

Now, FF, Net, and Opera handle the transparency fine (though Opera offsets the PNG to the right, but I'm not worried about Opera right now). IE does not, therefore it shows just the storm tracks on a white background (though, at least when I refresh, I can see the base image in the background so I know it's there, but it gets covered by the PNG).

Like I said, I know IE has issues with transparency and I wouldn't be asking this except for one thing: My header and logo are transparent and IE handles them fine. I know because I changed the bg color of my page. So, that leads me to believe that it's something in the formatting of the image. But I haven't done anything differently with the map PNG that I've done with the logo and header.

If anyone could take a look at it or provide some suggestions, I would certainly appreciate it. I have to admit I'm not familiar with the differences between 8/16/24-bit PNGs and whatever else, so bear with me. I just really would like to figure it out why this is happening.

Thanks in advance.kvarnerexpress

 

 

 

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well IE 7.0 accepts png format now so once it comes out you won't have to worry about that problem anymore.

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Can't really do anything about it, IE being an inferior relic compared to modern browsers such as Opera and Firefox. I would just totally ignore it and say somewhere on your site "Best viewed in Opera, FF and IE7+" or something like that.

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use .gif instead?

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Thanks man. This is good news. My forum buttons are in png format and the transparent part is visible and is annoying because it looks very ugly.

I also find that 80-90 percent visitors to my website are still internet explorer users, meaning non-technical persons hardly use any other browsers. Firstly, they are not very familiar with the appearance itself. Change of buttons itself can scare them and make them uncomfortable. Secondly, they are not used to adapt to new things easily like webmasters and other technical persons. This is the problem with common man though.
Thirdly, they find that tables break and ugly part of the code can cause so much trouble viewing the sites and they quickly switch to internet explorer which they are familiar with and friendly with.

Well, if IE also moves closer to firefox, I hope everyone will use one like firefox only from now on.

 

 

 

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8-bit PNGs behave exactly the same way as GIFs in that they use binary rather than alpha transparency which means you can knock out the background colour and that colour will show through the bits you've made transparent on your page.
24-bit PNGs use alpha transparency which means that it can have varying degrees of transparency and this is the kinda that IE doesn't support.

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Thanks for the info Tyssen, that will come in handy...it is very interesting too!

Thanks again!!

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